Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Despite such suggestions, Tom Sawyer remains Twain's joyful ode to the
endless possibilities of childhood.
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H. Daniel Peck is John Guy Vassar Professor of English at Vassar College and is the author of Thoreau's Morning
Work and A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction.
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About The Author
H. Daniel Peck is John Guy Vassar Professor of English at Vassar College and is the author of Thoreau's Morning
Work and A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction.

Biography
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri; his family moved to
the port town of Hannibal four years later. His father, an unsuccessful farmer, died when Twain was eleven. Soon
afterward the boy began working as an apprentice printer, and by age sixteen he was writing newspaper sketches.
He left Hannibal at eighteen to work as an itinerant printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati.
From 1857 to 1861 he worked on Mississippi steamboats, advancing from cub pilot to licensed pilot.

After river shipping was interrupted by the Civil War, Twain headed west with his brother Orion, who had been
appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory. Settling in Carson City, he tried his luck at prospecting and wrote
humorous pieces for a range of newspapers. Around this time he first began using the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived
from a riverboat term. Relocating to San Francisco, he became a regular newspaper correspondent and a contributor to
the literary magazine the Golden Era. He made a five-month journey to Hawaii in 1866 and the following year
traveled to Europe to report on the first organized tourist cruise. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
and Other Sketches (1867) consolidated his growing reputation as humorist and lecturer.
After his marriage to Livy Langdon, Twain settled first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades in Hartford,
Connecticut. His European sketches were expanded into The Innocents Abroad (1869), followed by Roughing It
(1872), an account of his Western adventures; both were enormously successful. Twain's literary triumphs were offset
by often ill-advised business dealings (he sank thousands of dollars, for instance, in a failed attempt to develop a new
kind of typesetting machine, and thousands more into his own ultimately unsuccessful publishing house) and
unrestrained spending that left him in frequent financial difficulty, a pattern that was to persist throughout his life.
Following The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, Twain began a literary
exploration of his childhood memories of the Mississippi, resulting in a trio of masterpieces --The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), on which he
had been working for nearly a decade. Another vein, of historical romance, found expression in The Prince and the
Pauper (1882), the satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and Personal Recollections of Joan
of Arc (1896), while he continued to draw on his travel experiences in A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Following the
Equator (1897). His close associates in these years included William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, and George
Washington Cable, as well as the dying Ulysses S. Grant, whom Twain encouraged to complete his memoirs,
published by Twain's publishing company in 1885.
For most of the 1890s Twain lived in Europe, as his life took a darker turn with the death of his daughter Susy in 1896
and the worsening illness of his daughter Jean. The tone of Twain's writing also turned progressively more bitter. The
Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), a detective story hinging on the consequences of slavery, was followed by
powerful anti-imperialist and anticolonial statements such as 'To the Person Sitting in Darkness' (1901), 'The War
Prayer' (1905), and 'King Leopold's Soliloquy' (1905), and by the pessimistic sketches collected in the privately
published What Is Man? (1906). The unfinished novel The Mysterious Stranger was perhaps the most
uncompromisingly dark of all Twain's later works. In his last years, his financial troubles finally resolved, Twain

settled near Redding, Connecticut, and died in his mansion, Stormfield, on April 21, 1910.
Author biography courtesy of Random House, Inc.

Reviews
Grade 5 Up-British actor Mike McShane provides a superb portrayal of Mark Twain's classic characters, nailing the
Mississippi drawl and cadence. For those who know and love the story or are following along with an unabridged
edition, however, this production is marred somewhat by what the publisher has chosen to leave out. The more
descriptive chapters are shortened or expurgated entirely, which is understandable in the interest of editing for time.
Some of the more distasteful racial epithets are gone as well, although Injun Joe retains his moniker. Sid and Mary
are also cut entirely, as well as references to smoking, slavery, most of Tom's ludicrously funny romantic notions
about the violence inflicted by pirates and robbers, and even the naked figure in the schoolmaster's anatomy book.
The result is a watered down Tom and, especially, Huck. The ending also lacks the satisfaction of the original
version. The party scene where the fortune is revealed has been cut as has Twain's concluding paragraphs which
"endeth this chronicle." It lacks even the closure of the customary, "You have been listening to-." The sturdy plastic
case will survive many circulations. If your facility serves an elementary-age population for which the language of
the original would not be appropriate, or there is a teacher looking for a sanitized version, McShane's excellent
performance makes this edition worth recommending.

I have decided to read the majority of Samuel Clemens ie Mark Twain. This is a great beginning story due to the
simplicity of the narrative. A part that stuck with me was Tom sitting in church while the preacher orally dictated
advertisements to the congregation. In his boredom Tom observed it was a useless custom and waste of time because
newspapers had modernized messages. "Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid
of it."

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is an excellent story about friendship and childhood. This was my first time reading
the story, but I knew the general story from other sources such as a live show in Hannibal MO, plus various TV and
movie recreations. All of those are great, but as is commonplace, the book was better.
Mark Twain captured the spirit of the kids he wrote about very well. Made it easy to grow attached to them, and care
for their well being. The story is sweet, entertaining and a bit suspenseful. An excellent read for anyone.

While I understand it is an amazing classic and I did enjoy a lot of the book it was hard for me to get into. While I like
adventure and a little mystery the book did not grip me as much as I thought it would and this is why I rated it the way
I did. I feel at times it repeated itself in some of the dialog as well as focused on immature nature in many of the boys
as acceptable. While as a kid it is always exciting to break the rules I believe it went a little overboard at times.

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Read An Excerpt
From H. Daniel Peck's Introduction to Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Mark Twain's "other" book, the one, it is said, that prepared the way for his
masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in which the hero of that work was born as a secondary figure.
There is much truth in this formulation. Huck Finn is indeed Twain's masterpiece, perhaps his only great novel. In
directly engaging slavery, it far surpasses the moral depth of Tom Sawyer, and its brilliant first-person narration as
well as its journey structure elevate it stylistically above the somewhat fragmentary and anecdotal Tom Sawyer. Yet it
is important to understand Tom Sawyer in its own terms, and not just as a run-up to Huck Finn. It was, after all, Mark
Twain's best-selling novel during much of the twentieth century; and it has always had a vast international following.
People who have never actually read the novel know its memorable episodes, such as the fence whitewashing scene,
and its characters-Tom foremost among them-who have entered into national folklore. The appeal of Tom Sawyer is
enduring, and it will be our purpose here to try to locate some of the sources of that appeal.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was Mark Twain's first novel (the first he authored by himself), but it is hardly the
work of an apprentice writer. By the time this book was published in 1876, Samuel L. Clemens was already well
known by his pen name Mark Twain, which he had adopted in 1863 while working as a reporter in Nevada. At the
time of the novel's publication, he was in his early forties and beginning to live in an architect-designed home in
Hartford, Connecticut. He had been married to his wife, Olivia, for six years, and two of his three daughters had been
born.
Up to this point, Twain had been known as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. His story "The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County," first published in 1865, had made him famous, and the lecture tours he had given in the
United States and England in these years had been well received. His books The Innocents Abroad (1869), which
satirizes an American sightseeing tour of the Middle East that he covered for a newspaper, and Roughing It (1872), an
account of the far west based on his own experiences there, were great successes. Both works were first published in
subscription form, and they quickly advanced Twain's reputation as a popular writer. His publication in 1873 of The
Gilded Age, a book coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner dramatizing the excesses of the post-Civil War period,
confirmed his place as a leading social critic.
Indeed, the America reflected in The Gilded Age-an America of greed, corruption, and materialism-may have driven
Twain back imaginatively to what seemed to him a simpler time-to "those old simple days", as he refers to them in the
concluding chapter of Tom Sawyer. The first significant sign of such a return in his publications was his nostalgic
essay "Old Times on the Mississippi," which appeared in 1875.3 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published the
following year, belongs to this return to antebellum America, and to the scene of Twain's growing up-Hannibal,
Missouri. That the author was able to draw upon his deepest reserves of childhood imagination in this work certainly
accounts for much of its appeal. A decade after its publication, he referred to the novel as a "hymn" to a forgotten
era,4 and while this characterization oversimplifies The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it also points to key aspects of its
composition and literary character.
In the novel, Twain renames Hannibal as St. Petersburg, thus suggesting, as John C. Gerber has said, St. Peter's place,
or heaven.5 But heaven, as Twain depicts it, is a real place. Many of the sites and topographical features are
identifiable. Cardiff Hill, so important in the novel as a setting for children's games such as Robin Hood, is Holliday's
Hill of Hannibal. Jackson's Island, the scene of the boys' life as "pirates," is recognizable as Glasscock's Island. And
McDougal's Cave, so central to the closing movement of the novel, has a real-life reference in McDowell's cave.
Human structures, like Aunt Polly's house, as well as the schoolhouse and the church, were similarly modeled after
identifiable buildings in Hannibal.
The autobiographical origins of the novel are also evident in the characters. In the preface, Twain says that "Huck Finn
is drawn from life" (in part from a childhood friend named Tom Blankenship), and "Tom Sawyer also, but not from an
individual-he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew." Schoolmates John Briggs and Will
Bowen probably were two of the three boys after whom Tom was modeled, and a good bet for the third is young Sam
Clemens himself. Many of Tom's qualities resemble Twain's descriptions of his young self, and several of Tom's
experiences-such as being forced by Aunt Polly to take the Painkiller and sitz baths-reflect the author's own. Aunt
Polly herself has several characteristics that link her to Sam Clemens's mother, Jane Clemens. And scholars have found
Hannibal counterparts for many of the other characters, including Becky Thatcher, Joe Harper, and Ben Rogers, as
well as the widow Douglas and the town's minister, schoolteacher, and doctor.

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